Mary Phillips, a St. Louis hospice nurse, was lying on the floor of her office last October with a bad headache, hoping it would go away. Though co-workers urged her to go to the hospital, it wasn’t until a 7-year-old maltipoo named Jacque-Pierre — a co-worker’s in-office companion — arrived and began insistently licking her temple that she agreed to get checked.
“When Jacque started licking my head, the old hospice nurse in me said, ‘Uh-oh,’ ” Phillips, a 56-year-old patient care supervisor at BJC Hospice, tells PEOPLE Pets. Her inkling about the pooch's animal instinct was right: She was subsequently diagnosed with a walnut-sized brain aneurysm.
Phillips says her experience with dying patients told her that animals “know that something is wrong” and that Jacque-Pierre was definitely upset.
Nurse would have gone to bed ‘and died’
“You could tell. He was dancing around the office and he just kept licking me,” she explains. If not for the dog’s insistence confirming her co-workers’ concerns, Phillips says she would have likely driven home, gone to bed “and died — because [the aneurysm] was leaking at that point into my head.”
The dog’s behavior stood out even more because Phillips isn’t a dog person, says his owner, Pat Harlan, a 76-year-old triage nurse.
“He has certain nurses that he loves to go to because they always have a little nibble for him,” Harlan says. But when he gets to Phillips’ office, he doesn’t stay because “she doesn’t love dogs that way.”
Since he was credited with saving her life, the pup has resumed pop-in visits with Phillips, who fully recovered and returned to work after recovering for two months. “I could lay down on the floor today. He might come over and sniff me,” says Phillips, “but he’d be off if I didn’t have something to feed him.”